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Filed under: young entrepreneurs

A blog about pride...

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Last night I attended the awards evening for SeedComp 2011 – a Digital Derry initiative to uncover the North West of Ireland’s most promising digital business ideas.  The process has been ongoing since late March & has resulted in 30 or so new business ideas emerging.  This type of competition is a fabulous way for any town to encourage & promote some innovation & entrepreneurialism.  The overall prize kitty last night was £10,000 and included a £1,000 prize for the most promising student idea - so it’s a very cost effective way to get some ideas moving in your community & get especially your young people thinking about starting their own businesses.  Most brand new ideas only need a tiny amount of money to get started.  We’re lucky to have our own Digital Champion, Mark Nagurski, in Derry to come up with competitions like this and then put in the hard graft to make them a success.  Definitely worthwhile if your town doesn’t already do something like this.

12 fledgling ideas were shortlisted at the start of May and the new promoters presented yesterday.  The judging panel included some tech industry veterans, one of Facebook’s senior executives, a couple of local entrepreneurs and a (friendly) VC.  A terrifying prospect and indeed one of the competitors shared with me at last night’s event that although he’s presented to both Steven Spielberg and James Cameron in his career so far, he was more nervous going into the room yesterday.

It was therefore with great pride that Paul & I witnessed our very own Breda Doherty pick up a prize as part of her new venture with her business partner Catherine Morris.  An all girl geek team.  What could ever be nicer?  Breda & Catherine met on the Invest NI/Digital Circle funded mission to this year’s SXSW event in Austin, Texas (thanks Matt!) and they’ve wasted no time in coming up with a new business idea & putting together a plan.  Their new idea has elements of the passion of the original Craigslist (Breda interviewed Craig Newmark at SXSW) and it uses Bill Liao’s homespun advice on marketing messages (Breda interviewed Bill in Washington DC); I’m hoping their relentless execution against plan will show that Breda has maybe even learned something from Paul & me along the way (good stuff only Breda!).  She’s certainly a different person today than the one who walked into the Learning Pool office in April 2008 to bring order to the chaos that existed at that time – more self confident, more informed about technology and investment, more assertive, more aware of how to get things done, more experienced, more of an all rounder...but still as sweet, still as stylish and still universally loved by her school chums, the whole of team lovely, our entire customer base and basically anyone who ever meets her.

Go Breda & Catherine – we’re all rooting for you & we can’t wait to see where this takes you.

Addendum to this blog (11 June 2011)

A few people have asked me why Paul & I are so supportive of one of our own star team members thinking about starting her own business...hmm...being a small business owner isn't just about finding people & extracting your pound of flesh from them over the time they work for you.  It's also about adding to your local community & giving back where you can, providing careers & challenge for your people and equipping them with the skills they need to go on & do something else.  Learning Pool is 5 years old this summer and we are lucky to have a high performing star team that's the envy of many other companies.  But after 3 years in a job, people are entitled to try their hand at something else and if they go on to take a stab at being an entrepreneur themselves, Paul & I see that as a perfect 10 scored for ourselves - our work is done & we've achieved one of the things we set out to. 

The other day a local entrepreneur I met at a lunch told me how he'd had someone come in to arrange the desks in his company so that everyone could see each others screens - his reason for doing that - so that no-one would be on Facebook during the hours of 9-5.  What did I do - I just sighed a bit to be honest.  He wasn't interested in what I had to say anyway.  Old fashioned companies with old fashioned opinions - think on.  Your days are probably numbered.

 

Invest in our future...

Yesterday I was privileged to be one of the judges in the Go For It Challenge 2010, run as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week.  Students from all over Northern Ireland had been challenged to come up with innovative, original & profitable business ideas and they were competing against each other in two age groups (14-16 years and 16-19 years).  There were two £1,000 prizes up for grabs.  I was intrigued to see what our young people would come up with, especially so soon after being one of the IntertradeIreland Seedcorn 2010 judges.  Let’s face it, those guys have been around a lot longer & have loads more experience of being in business and pitching.

I started to get excited when I looked through the business plans the 9 schools had submitted.  Some of the stuff we’d seen before in other incarnations but some of it was really fresh & innovative.  I wondered how the presentations would go given the age of the participants.  The pitches were held in a lecture hall in W5 in Belfast & everyone pitched in front of the other school teams, teachers, judges etc – as terrifying a pitching environment as I’ve ever been in myself.  Format was 5 minutes to pitch and 5 minutes of questions from the judging panel.  Ideas were as varied as a kit to turn a used drinks can into an MP3 player or iPod speaker, a device to help blind people identify objects, a wristband to help prevent Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, a system to stop schools wasting food, an idea to prevent students from losing their USBs at school, a kiosk to inform tourists visiting Derry during the 2013 City of Culture year, an online calorie & fitness manager, an optical media device and an online portal to allow visualisation of potential purchasers such as cars and houses.

The pitches were superconfident and would have been considered such even if the participants had been many years older.  The teams had really researched their chosen addressable markets & they made great use of video and sales collateral & a few had even built prototypes.  All of this had been prepared in a very short space of time.  They answered hard questions from the judging panel confidently and seamlessly in their teams as if they do this sort of thing all the time.  Last year the winners went on to compete in a UK wide competition and I’m dismayed to hear that this isn’t going ahead this year due to lack of funding support – what a shame we don’t collectively believe it’s a good idea to invest in our young people and encourage teenagers to start thinking like entrepreneurs whilst they’re still at school.

Matt Johnston was chairing the judging panel and he gave the teams some great advice – not least that you don’t need to seek permission to start a business – you can indeed Go For It right now – even if you are still at school.

We judged teams on the overall package yesterday – the idea, the market research, the pitch and how they answered questions, their use of multimedia – it’s one of the hardest decisions I’ve been part of taking this year as the standard was really excellent which made it very hard to choose – especially when one of the businesses (the iCan speaker) is ready to go right now.  Having met and talked to the guys from Abbey Grammar school in Newry I just know they’ll be selling these at school next week as fast as they can assemble them.

The winners from the younger teams were a group of girls from Thornhill College in Derry with their Megabite idea to reduce waste and improve choice in school dinners and the older group winners were the team from Belfast High School in Newtonabbey with their KPal nutritional management app.  Well done to everyone that took part.  I’m glad to see such an entrepreneurial wave rippling in our Northern Ireland schools.  I’d also like to say Well Done to Invest NI for having the vision to fund and run such a competition.  And Go For It teams, if any of you are looking for a job or want some advice about getting your business started and moving – you know where I am.

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